July 14, 2008

A New Look for Blogger Buster!

Today I've finally finished work on the new design for Blogger Buster! I hope you all like the new, clean look!

My main motivation for redesigning the site was to ensure articles could be easily read, and also to make the site load much faster. So I have stripped lots of unnecessary content from the template, and use far less scripts and images than before.

So far, I'm happy with the overall look of the design, especially now I can see this with my posts and widgets in place. There are still some areas and adjustments I would like to make over the next week or so, though in the meantime, please let me know what you think!

The Header Section

Deciding what to do about the header section was the most challenging part of the design process!

Thank you to everyone who posted a comment on the post I made about this, and also to everyone who contacted me directly. I was thrilled to see how many of you offered your opinions on this. While I had expected one choice to greatly outweigh the other, it seems Blogger Buster readers are divided in opinion!

For the time being I've decided to keep the current logo and the layout of the header. I am rather fond of the vector style logo, and as many of you pointed out in the comments, it does offer a sense of personality to the site.

In the future, I will probably work on a better site logo which uses less colors while representing the personality of the site. Especially now that I've seen this inspiring showcase of logo designs...

There are still some improvements to be made...

While uploading this template, I discovered a few areas of the template which still require further thought. I'm not satisfied with the sidebar and footer section yet, so you'll probably notice a little rearranging (and possibly replacement) of widgets over the next few days.

The forum is almost ready now, which will also have some impact on this new design. Just a few more tweaks are required to ensure the forum design matches that of the blog...

What do you think of the new look?

I hope that most of you will prefer this new design (I certainly do!). Does it load faster, and ensure posts are easier to read?

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All existing posts are still available to view while I'm working on the site, albeit seen in a much simpler interface. Feel free to browse through the archives to find tutorials, templates and articles to help you build a better blog: